


i'd choose you

by buckynatalia



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ark!Lexa, Brollexa, Canon-Typical Violence, Eventual Romance, F/F, Heda Clarke, Pre-Canon, Role Reversal, Role Reversal AU, a little bit, ark!braven, background braven
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-07
Updated: 2017-04-04
Packaged: 2018-08-29 14:52:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 8,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8494177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckynatalia/pseuds/buckynatalia
Summary: Clexa Role Reversal AULexa is born on the Ark, a strange lonely girl who wears ancient wedding dresses and reads whatever paper books she can get her hands on. Lexa is seventeen when she’s thrown in the skybox for second degree murder.Clarke is born on the ground, training for her conclave since she was a child. She's sixteen when she's given the flame, and two years later she's known as the most ruthless Commander they've ever had, the Wanheda. Everything changes when she sees a strange object fall from the sky, leaving behind a fiery contrail before landing in the woods several miles away. But you know the rest of the story. More or less.





	1. Chapter 1

_And I’d choose you; in a hundred lifetimes,_

_in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality,_

_I’d find you and I’d choose you._

_\-- Kiersten White_

_______

_______

 

Lexa is seventeen when she’s thrown in the skybox for second degree murder.

 She remembers that day, remembers the feeling of the guard’s skin beneath her fingernails. The sick crunch of her fist hitting bone. She remembers how she couldn’t stop hitting him. It was all a blur, his blood pooling on the floor. 

_ And he’d deserved it, he’d deserved it, he’d deserved it. _

But no one listened to her, and she never expected them to. It was easier, she knew, to lock her away into a colorless room and forget about her. It made quite a story.  _ Lexa Woods, the shy straight-A student who liked to wear old wedding dresses and read crumbling paper books, she beat a man to death. _

 Every night she scratches another notch into the wall -- she’s been in solitary for a year and a half, and she feels every moment in her bones. Her hair has grown down to her waist in thick tangles.

 Lexa sleeps away the day. 

 She has this one recurring dream she can’t seem to shake -- she’s standing in the middle of a dark and twisted forest, like in the old fairytales she used to read, and sometimes she wanders for hours. Her boots sinking deeper into the mud. Sometimes the earth opens, a wide crevasse, and she’s falling, falling, falling. 

 She jolts awake. Back to her miserable four-walled existence. 

They’ll float her soon, she knew. Her eighteenth birthday loomed closer, and god knows they wouldn’t spare an impulsive young girl with a body count. They’d lead her into the airlock and seal the doors tightly. There’d be a moment, before depressurization, the longest and quietest moment of her life. 

 She remembers the day Costia was floated. She remembers the other girl’s huge brown eyes staring through the airlock door at Lexa. Her hand pressed against the glass. And then the lever is pulled and her body spins out, out, out like a little rag doll. 

 Lexa would be next. 

 The idea begins to bother her less and less. 

_______

_______

 

 Clarke is sixteen and she stands alone in a clearing, hands are slick with blood, glistening dark like an oil spill. The other nightbloods lay at her feet. Finn with flies buzzing in and out of his mouth. They could have been sleeping, were it not for the unnatural angles of their limbs, their eyes still wide open. 

 Clarke stepped over their bodies, shivering. Oh, God. She'd loved them like they were her own blood, but she'd memorized their weaknesses  years ago. It hurts, how simply Clarke had done this, a blur of teeth and steel blade and snarling mouth.    
  
  It was over. They shroud the bodies in white cloth and burn them -- the  _ natblida _ ’s flesh turns to smoke, and they dissolve into the clouds. 

 Up to heaven. Up to whatever comes next. 

 Clarke watches from the tower, far above Polis. The ceremony begins and her hair is swept gently over her shoulder. She feels an obsidian blade slitting the skin at the nape of her neck. An inch long incision. There’s the piercing pain of the flame latching onto her, wrapping itself around her brain. Blood began to trickle down her neck in a thin trail that winds down her back. 

 There's a moment where everything is still. Clarke closes her eyes and wonders, distantly, if there's been a mistake, if all of this has been for nothing. 

 Then it starts, slowly and then all at once. A warm white light behind her eyelids, and a rush of memories that were not her own. 

 When she opens her eyes, she's not just Clarke anymore -- she’s the  _ Heda _ . Her people begin to chant her name, their voices swelling until the whole room is full. 

 But, still, no one will look Clarke in the eye.

 

_______

_______

 

  1. The lights flicker on in the middle of the night. The cell door shudders open.



“Let’s go, Ms. Woods,” a guard barks at her, watching her like she’s something feral. Her eyes flick towards the door, a sliver of light, a sliver of freedom.

Lexa  _ bolts. _

 And within seconds, there’s three guards holding her down. Pressing her face to the floor, she thinks of the word  _ smother.  _ She turns and bites down hard on someone’s finger, the salt of someone’s blood filling her mouth.

“We got a fighter,” one of the guards says under their breath, sounding disgusted. 

 Lexa feels the metallic pain of a needle sliding into her neck, and then nothing but dark, dark, dark.

  When Lexa wakes up, mouth dry, she’s strapped tightly to a seat, shoulder-to-shoulder with dozens of other teenagers. The room is brimming with other kids from the skybox. Some were shouting, some were deathly quiet, some had their eyes squeezed shut.

 “You’re awake,” said a voice to her left -- a boy around her age, brown skin smattered with freckles. He looks vaguely familiar -- she thinks she's seen him mopping floors and wiping down portholes. 

“Where are we?” Lexa asks him, her voice still slurring slightly from whatever tranquilizer they’d given her. He looks at her sidelong. 

“A dropship,” he says, not an ounce of happiness in his voice, “they’re sending us down to the ground.” 

 Lexa frowned. “We’re going to Earth?”

 “Yeah, well, we will if we don’t burn up in the atmosphere first.” 

The whole room -- no, dropship -- shudders violently. There’s an explosive roar. A grinding of metal, someone’s shrill scream. And then they’re hurtling forward into the darkness, Lexa’s head pressed against the seat, and she feels the acceleration building in her chest.

Lexa keeps her eyes open the whole time. She couldn’t bear not knowing.

_________

_________

 

Clarke walks the streets of Polis, fallen leaves crunching beneath her boots. Her people are preparing for the autumn Equinox, the turning of the seasons. When Clarke passes by, they gather their children into their arms and dart away. 

 But she couldn't blame them. She'd heard the stories, that the  _ Wanheda _ brought death to everything she touched. 

 It's been a year since she brought down the ice nation, defeating their army on an icy tundra of a battlefield. Clarke had beheaded Queen Nia herself. Crimson blood spreading across the snow. She didn't feel any remorse, she just felt numb. 

_ Never again would anyone in the 12 clans bow to a tyrant, _ Clarke had promised.  _ Never again would Trikru children be stolen from their beds. Never again.  _

Clarke took a deep breath. She didn't need to be thinking of the past, not on a day like today when the sun shone down and the sky was blue as anything. 

 The day wore on. 

 It was noon when she heard the shouts. People pointing towards the sky. She tilted her head back and looked, saw the comet streaking across the sky. It left behind a fiery contrail, growing larger before it crashed into the treeline miles and miles away. 

 It was like nothing she’d ever seen before. 

 “ _ Slip skaifaya _ ,” someone said quietly. A falling star. 

 But that didn’t seem right -- Clarke couldn’t help but feel as if whatever had fallen should have stayed where it was. 

_________

_________


	2. Chapter 2

It was a rough journey. As the overhead lights flickered and the dropship shook violently, Lexa had wondered if they’d make it to the ground in one piece. Or maybe they’d burn up in the atmosphere just as Bellamy said they might.

But they land squarely on the ground. Just like they were supposed to.

Lexa will never forget the moment the dropship door opened with a loud _whoosh_. Sunlight washed over her, warm and forgiving. Lexa took her first breath of real air, and everything smelled green, green, green.

Her boots sink a few inches into the mossy earth. Lexa stands there for a long time, her hair head tilted skyward. She breathed deeply.

It’s just like she dreamed.

It’s a beautiful afternoon, and a group of them wanders down to the river. Lexa sits on the rocky bank, watching as the other delinquent dare each other to swing across the river on a thick, ropelike vine. The sound of water rushing over rocks soothes her, mingles with the soft sound of a girl’s laughter.

Until the laughter stops abruptly.

Until the screaming starts.

Lexa’s turns to look across the river, watches Jasper crumple to the ground with a spearhead buried deep in his chest. Terror twists in her gut. She watches his blood congeal around the shaft of the spear, watches his eyes glaze over.

Lexa turns and scrambles towards the treeline. She crashes through the woods, the other delinquents following close behind her. Lexa feels her heart. Thump-thump-thump against her rib cage, and the adrenaline makes her movements ungraceful, she’s running blindly towards safety.

They weren’t alone.

Nothing is the same, after that.

They spend the next few days rushing to build a wall around their camp, lashing together pine trees and pieces of scrap metal that they’d salvaged from the dropship. They pile it taller and taller, until it’s three feet wide and towers over Lexa’s head.

Lexa stares at what they’ve built. To protect themselves. To ensure that they won't get impaled with spears and knives and sharp things. How primeval it all seems.

“It’ll hold.”

Lexa turns to see Bellamy, coming to stand beside her. His voice is slightly hoarse, and she could see why, they'd both spent the day shouting orders across camp.

“It has to,” says Lexa. “There's no other choice.”

They stand there in silence.

Lexa thinks about whoever had thrown the spear. Lexa thinks about the eerie stillness of the woods. Lexa thinks about the last time she'd seen Bellamy’s face, plastered across the holopads back on the Ark. He'd been hiding his illegal little sister beneath the floor for sixteen years.

The only brother left in the universe. She thought there was something poetic about that.

“I remember you,” says Bellamy finally, “you lived down the hall from me growing up.”

“Really? You look familiar.”

“I'd always thought you were one of those quiet, guarded types.”

“I used to be,” she admits. “I spent a whole year in solitary, and god, it gets so quiet in those cells that you start hearing things that aren't there. I guess I'm just sick of the silence.”

“Good,” he says, “‘cause we need your voice.”

____________  
____________

 

It’s late at night and Clarke leans against the edge of the war table, staring down at the map. In the dim candlelight, the tiny figurines cast shadows across the hills and valleys. The forests are ruled by trikru warriors.

Clarke picked up one of the figurines and rolled it between her fingers. The little wooden markers seemed so incongruent with the living, breathing army waiting to attack at her command. Her living, breathing warriors who would lay down their life for her. Clarke could hardly fathom it.

She carefully placed the figurine at the edge of trikru territory. Her eyes scanned the board -- someone had placed a tin can where the so-called star had fallen, and Clarke imagined a hundred humans spilling out of it, no bigger than cockroaches. The thought turned her stomach.

“ _Heda_ , may I come in?”

“You may.”

Indra swept into the tent, bringing a gust of wintry air with her. The older woman’s hand rested on the scabbard at her waist, a natural reflex. For a moment they just stared at each other blankly. Clarke felt as if Indra had never particularly liked her, even as a child, there had been nothing but resigned toleration from her. Coldness, even. The air between them seemed taut as a wire.

“What do you intend to do about the sky people?” Indra asked Clarke, chin raised. She was never one for pleasantries. “They're invading our territory, claiming the --”

“Send our army. They're pale and fragile, no match for our warriors.”

“They've proven to be persistent, _heda_."

“So was the ice nation.”

Everything was still for a moment. The space between one woman and another. The space between her synapses and the Flame coiled around her brain. The space between one war and the next.

Clarke’s voice was dangerously low. She turned back to the war table.

“Wipe them out.”

 

____________  
____________

 

It's the earliest hours of the morning and a small pod falls from the heavens, cutting the sky in half. A small group of them stand in the middle of the camp, Lexa still rubbing sleep from her eyes as she stands staring upwards. They assume that the Ark had sent down supplies to help them -- supplies, blankets, medicine maybe. They agree to leave in the morning to hunt it down.

But they should have known. Down here nothing goes as planned.

They find a girl.

Lexa finds her curled inside the pod, her hairline matted with blood. Crimson dribbling down her forehead and into her eyes. The girl takes her first steps, wavering, dead leaves giving way beneath her boots. The stranger spreads her arms like wings, and turns slowly. She breathes.

Bellamy looks as if he’s seen a ghost. “Raven?”

Her eyes light up, as if she’s remembering why she came to Earth in the first place. As if all roads lead back to him.

They crash together. The strange bird-boned girl throws her arms around his neck, and Bellamy holds her so tightly her feet lift off the ground just a little.

Looking at them, Lexa wonders if some people are never meant to be apart.

 

A month passes by and they don’t stop digging graves. They lose four to acid fog, their bodies blistered and raw by the time they’re found. They lose five to the grounders, rusty blades buried deep within their skulls. They lose the chancellor’s son to a scared little girl who ends up diving off a cliff, anyway.

Lexa learns things about herself that she never knew before. She’s quick with a knife. She can control a seething, raging crowd, make them listen to her, make them follow her orders without question. Bellamy says Lexa was born to lead. And she could say the same of him.

The grounders send sickness, and the dropship floor is slick with blood and bile.

The grounders send warriors, and the delinquents load their guns with bullets. Lexa never liked the weight of a rifle resting against her shoulder, the coldness of it in her hands. She hates the urgent, hollow bang as she pulls the trigger. She hates that she’s a damn good shot.

They fight and they fight and they still lose, in the end. Their battles were nothing like the old stories she had read back on the Ark. Happy endings were hard to come by.

The air smells like rancid smoke and she hears one of Raven’s landmines detonate, feels the ground shudder as someone is blown to hell. It’s chaos. Their gates are overrun, grounders spilling into their camp with their knives and spears and guttural shouts.

“Get inside,” Lexa shouts. “Go.”

And they retreat to the cool walls of the dropship. Lexa glances over and sees Raven sitting in a pool of her own blood, sickly pale, her callused fingers working tirelessly to keep them alive. Someone shouts that Bellamy isn’t inside, that Fox isn’t inside, that their best friend isn’t inside. As if she didn’t know that.

Lexa pulls the lever, the door closing with a hiss.

  
A grounder woman slides through the gap at the last moment -- Anya. A dozen people level a gun at the intruder. As tired as she was, Lexa couldn’t help but find the older woman impressive. She was so brave it could be mistaken for dimwittedness.

“Kill her,” a boy said roughly.

Lexa pushed past him, swiftly bringing the butt of the gun down against Anya’s temple. The woman crumples to the floor. Her breaths come shallow.

Fists banged violently on the outside of the dropship. Louder and louder and louder. The grinding of metal on metal. The grounder warriors were trying to pry open the door. With every passing moment the door got closer to being compromised.

“Raven,” Lexa said, swallowing hard.

“Blast off.”

  
There was a moment of uneasy almost-silence.

  
And then the whole dropship began to rumble, as if the earth were going to crack open and swallow them whole.

  
____________  
____________


	3. Chapter 3

_____________

_____________

 

 

 “What are the three pillars of being  _ Heda _ ?” Clarke asks softly, her voice carrying across the huge throne room.  The nightbloods sit in a half-circle around her, faces upturned like sunflowers to the sun. Knobby little knees and small hands. 

 “Wisdom,” said the tallest.

 “Strength,” said the oldest.  

 “And compassion,” said the tiniest, leaning back on her hands. Clarke wasn’t supposed to pick favorites, but she’d always rooted for this little girl. There was something unknowable about the child. Something quietly violent. 

 Clarke nodded at them, slowly, offering the glimmer of a smile. Clarke almost can’t stand to look at them -- the blind hope in their eyes makes her feel sick to her stomach. 

 But still, foolishly, they looked up to her. Their love collected like tree sap on her skin and she couldn't wash it off no matter how hard she tried. 

 “Remember,” said Clarke, “remember that you're capable of doing anything, but not everything. Remember that you're worthy of your blood.”

 The early morning light washed over their faces. And they were so young, the flush of childhood still turning their cheeks rosy. If she was a better person, she would have been an older sister to them. A guiding hand. A mother, even. 

 But she wouldn't know how. 

 

_____________

_____________

 

 

When they open the doors, there’s nothing left except grey ash, shifting beneath their feet like the soft snow in the old Earth movies. It’s ingrained into the laces of Lexa’s boots, into the soles, and this doesn’t disturb her as much as it should. 

 “Goddamn,” Lexa breathes. 

 There’s dozens of scattered bones, ribcages. She finds herself looking at the width of the skeletal shoulders, the structure of their cheekbones, subconsciously looking for Bellamy. Or whatever remained of him. 

 She’s so absorbed in this that she doesn’t notice the red smoke until she’s surrounded by it. Metal canisters skitter across the ground, and Lexa’s lungs fill with the tainted smoke, her throat on fire. 

 “Mountain men,” hisses Anya, her voice shot through with fear. 

 Lexa finds she can’t breathe. The world dissolves, hissing, in shades of red.

  
  


 

 She wakes up in a blisteringly white hospital room. 

 A paper gown crackles against her skin. For a moment she wonders if she’s back on the Ark, and her stomach plummets. But no, there’s no engine hum. There’s no place in the skybox as clean or as well-lit as this room.

 Lexa yanks the IV drip out of her arm. God, she hated needles. 

 The tile floor was cold beneath her feet, sending shivers running up and down her body. 

 Where the fuck  _ was _ she?

 Lexa pads over the door, jiggling the handle. Locked. She peers through little window embedded in the door, and saw an empty cement hallway.  _ Mt. Weather _ is printed on the wall in bold text. And then across the hall there's a little circular window with Monty’s face swimming in and out of it. 

_ Monty _ . Her friend looks pale and drawn. He's yelling her name, and Lexa tries to shout and ask if he's safe, if she's hurt, but the sound doesn't escape the sealed doors. Nothing does. 

 Lexa backs away. Disbelieving. She couldn’t be trapped in a claustrophobic little room again.  _ Not again not again not again.  _ Hours go by and she paces the room like a caged animal. Back and forth and back and forth.

 Until there's a faceless figure wearing a hazmat suit in the room across the hallway. The figure was disinfecting the room, carefully spraying it down as if cleaning up after a mess. They'd taken Monty. 

 Lexa stood back. 

 The door was solid metal, five inches thick. There was no way Lexa, with her willowy little frame and pounding headache, was going to bust it open with brute force. There had to be some other way. 

 She grabs hold of the metal IV drip, the metal frame cold in her hands. Lexa smashes the end into the window, and the glass shatters, little icy slivers skittering across the floor. She reaches over and unlocks the door, accidentally slicing her arm as she does.

 Lexa picks up a wickedly sharp piece of glass. She knows what she has to do. 

 

 

 She scares the girl half to death, but still they forgive her, wrap her injured arm with soft cotton bandages. They say the mountain is safe. There are no windows, or exits, and there’s dozens of doors that lead to nowhere at all. But there’s good food, as much as she cares to eat. There’s clothes, as much as she wants, and Lexa dresses in a warm woollen sweater and a pair of high-waisted blue jeans. Untouched by dirt or blood or ash. 

The rooms are filled with music and warm laughter. Illuminated by delicate paper lamps that bathe everything in golden light. Their food i It's perfect. Wherever she looks, there's strangers who smile and smile and smile. It’s as if they were not allowed to stop.

 But she was always too inquisitive, too distrustful. Within a week, Lexa finds a room past the locked doors and empty hallways. A hidden thing. The air is dense with misery, smelling of disinfectant and human waste -- Lexa’s stomach turns. There’s hundreds of grounders caged, broken, strung up from the ceiling with their limbs hanging limp at the joints. 

 There’s a woman slumped at the back of a cage. Scraggly dark hair that’s honey-colored on the ends. Hugging her legs to her chest. Wearing nothing but gauze. 

 “Anya?”

 “You again.”

 So they run. Anya on unsteady legs, Lexa’s blood rushing to her head. And they fall. An endless tunnel in the dark, the press of corpses on all sides of her. The shouts of cannibals. The orange glow of a flame behind closed eyes. They run, and run, and run. They fall, and fall, and fall. 

 And they’re free. 

 

_____________

_____________

 

 

 Clarke lowered herself into the scalding hot bath, the water silky on her skin. Her handmaidens must have added some sort of oil, to relax her muscles, to make her feel real again. It was hard to stay clean while they were traveling, especially this many miles away from Polis. Someone must have carried buckets of water up from the river. 

  Clarke scrubbed at her skin with a rag, washed away the grime and soot. 

 She ran her fingers over the tattoo that spanned her upper thigh. Clarke had done it herself when she was fifteen -- she remembers the hours it had taken, painstakingly poking the ink into her skin with a bone needle. It had hurt. But as the hours went on, flowers began to bloom. Vines curled around her inner thighs in shades of gray.

 But now the tattoos hid beneath the layers of clothing. No one would have guessed --  the commander of death covered in flowers. It was something she kept to herself. The only thing she kept to herself, really, no one saw her skin except for the occasional pretty foreigner who would stay the night.

  “Beautiful,” the last girl had whispered, studying the tapestry of ink that spanned Clarke’s body. Not quite understanding. Clarke had a bird’s skull on her rib cage, a cluster of pine trees at the base of her spine. Relics of a time before. 

 The water’s gone cold. But at least no one would bother her here. Floating gently in the tepid, grey-tinged water with only her thoughts for company. It wasn’t unpleasant. If only Clarke’s intrusive thoughts and strange memories would stop swirling together like toxic slush. 

 “ _ Heda _ ?”

 Clarke opened her eyes. Her handmaiden hovered at the edge of the tent, lips parted just a little. 

 “What is it?”

 “There’s someone here to see you --   _ Nomtri kom skaifaya _ .”  

 Daughter of the stars. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey, please leave a comment if you liked this! tell me what you think, it'll encourage me to keep writing and stay motivated. thanks for reading :)


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clarke meets the daughter of the stars -- and the girl isn't at all what she expected.

 

_____________

_____________

 

_"Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies,_

_and though a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same,_

_it’s still a cloud and so is a soul._

_Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be tomorrow?"_

\- David Mitchell

 

_____________

_____________

 

 Lexa trudges up the hill towards the so-called _Heda’s_ tent, boots sinking into mud the whole way. Every step took great effort. It was as if the very earth were trying to slow her down.

 The grounder warriors watch her move through the camp with eyes like hawks, piercing through her. Lexa moved with intention. One wrong move and they'd be at her throat in an instant. She wasn't stupid.

 A pair of broad-shouldered guards stood at the entryway of the huge tent, bristling with weapons. She supposed she was supposed to be intimidated, but all she felt was numb. Lexa’s heart _was_ pounding in her throat. Her mouth was dry. Some feral part of her whispered to _run_.

 Lexa parted the tent flaps and stepped inside. It was dim, light barely filtering through the woven tapestries that made up the ceiling, distant corners shadowed. At the center was a beautiful girl sitting on a monstrous twisted throne. Her hair tumbled over her shoulder like a lion’s mane, tawny gold and wild as anything. Her mouth set into a snarl to match.

 Lexa’s eyes drifted down to the other girl’s hands, long fingers turning a knife over and over and over. This girl -- the commander, Lexa realized -- looked as if she could carve her to pieces and eat her for breakfast.

 “You're the one that burned three hundred of my people alive,” the commander drawled.

 “You're the one that sent them.”

 The space between them was tense, as if they were connected by some invisible wire that had been strung too tight. Close to breaking, but not quite.

 Something deep within her ached. Lexa couldn't imagine why.

 Lexa opened her mouth and began to speak. Knowing her life depended on it. Knowing everything, everything, everything, depended on convincing the snarling lioness not to kill them all.

 

————

 

 The daughter of the stars comes and asks for peace. Foolish, but Clarke can't help but commend her bravery. The girl carries herself like a queen, head held high, reminds Clarke of the person she used to be.

 And that’s no bad thing.

 God, the sky girl looks nothing like Clarke imagined. She expected some kind of wizened old leader, not a young girl with a willowy frame and a pretty face pale as the moon. Eyes the color of murky riverwater. The sky girl looked as if heaven had chewed her up and spat her out again. And maybe it had.

 Lexa says that she’d escaped from the mountain only days before -- nevermind that no one escaped from the mountain, and those who went in came out monsters or corpses.

 “You're lying,” Clarke had spat.

 Lexa had shaken her head. The sky girl pulls something out of her pocket, a dark braid shot through with honey, _Anya’s_ braid. Small and dull.

 “She died a good death,” Lexa assured her, voice soft. “Anya told me you would consider an alliance. She wanted our people to work together to bring down the mountain.”

 Clarke pauses. Focusing in on the small braid in her hand. Anya had been the one to braid her hair back for the first time, never too gently, tugging at Clarke’s wispy tendrils until beautiful patterns were woven into her hair. She missed her mentor. She missed the closest thing to family she ever had.

 “You said you could turn reapers back into men,” Clarke said finally, all of her old bravado melting away.

 Lexa nodded. “Yes.”

 “Then show me.”

 

 

 The daughter of the stars was just a girl. That's what it came down to.

 Crouched over a dead man in reaper’s clothing. Lincoln, bleeding from the mouth. Unsavable. There was an arc of electricity as Lexa jolted his heart back into motion. And then a sudden, huge gasp of air and the man on the floor was alive, alive, alive.

  Another skaikru girl is sobbing, presses a kiss to Lincoln’s lips. Clarke wondered, distantly, if death had a taste. If she’d come to know it, someday.

 She knew it was only a matter of time.

 

 

 “I'll do anything,” Lexa promises.

 They're alone in her war tent and Clarke can see the desperation in the other girl’s eyes. Something almost feral. She really would do anything to save her people, Clarke can see that now.

 Lexa kills the girl called Monroe.

 Compensation for eighteen villagers who had been slaughtered in the skaikru’s attempt to bring back their leader. There had been a squeeze of a trigger and an entire village was leveled. Lives lost because of a hysterical young girl.

 Blood must have blood, Clarke knows, that's the way life goes. Life is meaningless without death.

 And then. The slip of a knife and Monroe is bleeding out in front of all of them. Stupid girl. Shirt soaked through and her head slumps to her chest.

 Lexa steps away, trembling. Hands slick.

 Clarke watches Lexa closely. First time killing a loved one -- there was something intimate about that. Something awful in the way Lexa carries herself now, shoulders hunched. Those big eyes glassy like the surface of a pond. So close to tears.

 “It is done,” Clarke said. The night is dark and the torches don't quite illuminate the edge of the woods, or her people's faces, everything is monstrous and without shape. “The girl is dead, it is done.”

 Lexa turns and looks at her. And Clarke knows then -- for them it is only the beginning.

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

  
\------------  
  
Lexa stands with her boots planted firmly in the dust. She’s in the middle of a grounder village and everyone is watching her light the funeral pyre, and everyone is picking her apart with their eyes. She stands there and she watches Monroe’s body burn. Cranes her neck and watches the black smoke rising upwards, dissolving into the clouds. That’s something like heaven, wasn’t it? Letting the sky reclaim you.

  
People begin to file away.

She doesn’t know where they go to, because all she sees are the flames. Some part of her couldn’t fathom that all of this had happened. Lexa was supposed to be a leader, someone who solved problems and overcame every threat in their way. She still remembers the blind terror in Monroe’s eyes. The soft exhalation of breath as her friend crumpled around a knife to the gut. At least it was quick.

  
“I lost a friend too,” Clarke said softly.   
Lexa shot a sidelong glance at the other girl, who was standing there staring into the embers, a hand resting on her sword, war paint smeared in a careful arc beneath her eyes. Poised as ever. The commander looked as if she had been carved from marble.

  
Clarke says she lost her first love. She dances around the truth, spares the fine details. But Lexa can see the tragedy between her words -- one day he was here, and the next he wasn’t. A living breathing boy replaced by a spatter of blood and a pile of ashes. Maybe some of his blood on Clarke’s hands. Or all of it.

  
Lexa couldn’t be sure. Not that it mattered, anymore.

  
Clarke says love is weakness. She says this with absolute surety, without any waver to her voice. She had just stopped caring -- about everyone and everything. Lexa had a hard time believing that Clarke’s love is weakness mantra was anything more than a coping mechanism. But still, there was something appealing about numbing out. To everything.

  
Lexa could feel Clarke’s gaze on her, soft and lingering. And then the Commander turned on her heel and left without another word.

  
Leaving only the embers, and the bones, and the girl who breathed in the smoky air and did not allow herself to cry.

 

 

  
The alliance begins, stuttering to life and lurching forward with a groan, and Lexa feels the heavy accusing gaze of the grounder warriors wherever she goes. They blame her for all of this, they think the sky people should have stayed far above the membrane of the atmosphere where they belonged. Lexa couldn't blame them. Some days she still felt out of place. Like a stranger.

  
Peace wasn't the absence of violence, she had come to realize. Peace was something that had to be made new every single day. At dawn they had gathered around a table, the best trikru warriors and strategists arguing about what course of action should be taken.   
And Clarke holds them all together, somehow. There was something about her that demanded total captivation, the heda held an entire room in the palm of her hand. No one would dare disobey her.

Clarke was more feared than she was loved, but Lexa supposed devotion was devotion no matter where it came from.

  
“The nomtri kom skaifaya is under my protection. You attack her, you attack me,” Clarke snarls to a room full of people, shoulder to shoulder with Lexa, and something electric sizzles in the air. There was something strange and lovely about someone so terrifying treating you with kindness. It felt tender as a bruise on smooth skin.

  
An hour later Lexa goes outside to catch her breath. The underground council room grew close with bodies and voices, it had grown overwhelming. So Lexa wanders to the edge of the woods and beyond, moss giving way beneath her feet as she walked. Mornings like this, it's easy to forget that her world had once been a cement box. The distant canopy of the treetops, the birdsong, they had started to feel like home.

  
There was a moment where everything was still and the air was sweet in her lungs, and Lexa felt almost at peace.

  
Then the moment ended.

  
___________  
___________

 

Clarke could feel that something was wrong.

A small uneasiness in the pit of her stomach that had grown with each minute Lexa was gone. Swelling into nausea. And Clarke was running to the edge of the woods, she was following the trail that the sky girl had left behind, narrow tracks in the dirt and snapped twigs. By the time she crests the hill, it's almost too late.

  
In the clearing stood a young warrior, hardly more than a second, his features twisted with emotion. His dagger was drawn and he was moving towards Lexa too quickly. Shoulders squared.

  
The knife was flying out of Clarke’s hand before she knew it. Spinning end over end and piercing through the center of the man’s palm. He cried out, reeling away from Lexa. The other girl was pale, standing there bird-boned and breathless as if she were about to take flight.

  
“Are you hurt?”

  
Lexa shook her head. Lexa opened her mouth to speak, but instead.

  
A terrible roar so loud and so low that Clarke felt it in her chest. The very earth shook with monstrous footfalls. She was shouting -- Pauna. She was pulling Lexa away and they were running and running and running.

 

 

 

The pauna almost reduces them to bones and a greasy pile of mismatched organs. They're trapped in a room that smells like decay. Clarke is painfully aware of the monstrous creature roaring outside, slamming against the door, and she is ready for the darkness to rush up and meet her. A strange sense of calm washes over her, then.

  
Clarke is ready to die.

  
But Lexa sure as hell wasn't.

  
In the end it’s Lexa who saves them both. Clever clever clever girl who tricked the monster into its own cage, thought her way out of a nightmare. Clarke had seen seasoned warriors who weren’t half as sharp and resilient as Lexa was.

  
They stumble away into the forest. The pauna roars behind them, the sound muffled by layers and layers of the concrete that imprison it.

  
Clarke’s arm twinges painfully whenever she moves, even supported by the sling Lexa had fashioned together. The two of them walk more than half a mile before collapsing in a mossy clearing. Clarke leans against a fallen tree, the old thing slowly gradually decomposing into dirt. Like all things did.

  
“Rest your eyes,” she urges the other girl. And Lexa doesn't argue, just curls into the fetal position with her head pillowed on her arm and falls fast asleep. The sky girl looks angelic like this. Even here. Even streaked with grime.

  
When Clarke was a little girl, she had met a shaman who lived all alone deep in the northern territories. Her hut smelled of burning sage and something rancid. The woman had told her that all humans we're made of skaifaya ostof -- what remained when the stars burnt out.

  
Star-dust.

  
Clarke had always had a hard time comprehending this. Humans could be dirty and horrible and twisted. She had lain awake so many nights staring at the veins winding up her wrists, at the scars that marred her body, the impure parts of her, wondering how there could be anything celestial about them.

  
But looking at Lexa, it all made sense.

  
She thinks, distantly, the two of them could have been made from the same star.


	6. Chapter 6

 

_I would like to be the air that inhabits you_   
_for a moment only._   
_I would like to be that unnoticed_   
_and that necessary._

  
_—_ margaret atwood

   
 _____________  
___________

 

Weeks go by and the feeling of uncertainty swells within Lexa, growing larger and more demanding until she feels like one of those starving children on the Ark, their bellies bloated. Except now she’s starved for safety. Something a protein pack can’t fix. It didn't help that unseen things hid in the trees and she could feel the pale men beneath the mountain watching her. Everywhere she went. Lexa had forgotten what it felt like to sleep soundly, without paranoia itching at the back of her mind.

Nights were uneasy things. Warriors huddled around campfires and Lexa stayed up to watch Heda Clarke lean over the war table in her soft sleep clothes. Frowning down at the model mountain and the model troops. Sleep didn't come and neither of them expected it to.

But in the morning Heda Clarke’s eyes were somehow always clear. She carried herself like a goddess even now, sleep deprived and with her boots sinking into the muddy earth. Bloodstains on her cape. The wind tossing her hair.   
Lexa wondered if they'd tell stories about the Wanheda years from now -- maybe bored children would gather around campfires and listen to the tales of the commander of death. Lexa hoped the stories wouldn't fail to mention that in the early mornings before the sun had fully risen, the fearsome commander was just a girl with a sleepy mouth and messy hair.

  
And more than anything, Lexa hoped she'd be around to hear them.

  
___________  
___________

 

They find out about the missile from the star-boy inside the mountain. A relaying of messages, a crackling voice over a handheld radio. In all honesty, Clarke hadn't fully expected the boy to pull through. He was a total unknown. But Lexa had been right to trust him, she saw that now, and now here they were with the right information and faced with an impossible choice.

Evacuating TonDC would mean revealing that they had a man on the inside. Not evacuating TonDC would mean hundreds, thousands of lives would be lost.

  
Lexa is distraught.

  
Grabbing Clarke by the arm and shouting that they should spare as many lives as they can, that they can't let allow their people to be bombed. And Clarke ached for her. She remembered what it had been like, the first few times she had been forced to make awful decisions like this. Navigating the gray area between right and wrong was never easy.

  
And she would have stayed and listened to Lexa, if she weren't so damn concerned with, you know, getting out of TonDC before the missile hit. Saving two lives at the very least.

  
“We have to go,” Clarke tells the other girl, pulling a hood over her head, tossing Lexa a woven shawl so she can do the same. “Now.”

  
No one sees them leave. Twin shadows slipping between houses and disappearing into the treeline. Clarke leads the way. Clarke pretends not to notice when the moonlight reflects in Lexa’s eyes, glossy and full of tears.

  
The blast knocks both of them off their feet. The ringing in her ears is deafening and someone is screaming and something is burning and the inside of her chest feels bruised.

  
Clarke gets to her feet, aching, and locks eyes with Lexa. The sky girl’s face is grimy and her hood has slipped back a few inches -- she looks shaken to the core.

  
But they both knew that it had to be done.

  
It's not easy being in charge.

 

 

It's just as bad as Clarke expected.

Worse, even. She remembers the stories from when she was a child -- the last missile had left a crater so wide you could hardly see across it. It had seemed unfathomable at the time, but here they were.

  
The two of them stand on top of the hill overlooking TonDC, the thriving village reduced to a smoking pile of rubble.

Instead of the usual drone of cicadas and soft murmuring around campfires, there was the wail of someone sobbing, there were shouts that grew more and more urgent as they found people among the debris.

  
Between the ruined buildings and tents, people stumbled around in a daze, some tried to help, and still more lay crumpled and unmoving on the ground. It was horrific.

  
And she could have prevented it, a voice whispered in the back of Clarke’s mind. She inhaled slowly, wishing that the wintry air laced with rancid smoke could drive out the intrusive thoughts. Lexa imagined that if someone were to slice open her head and lift out her brain in their hands, it would drip with honey and oily green guilt.

  
Nothing more and nothing less.

  
And then the gunshots started. Bullets whizzing through the air and landing with perfect accuracy. _Thwack_ and an older woman dropped stiffly to the ground. _Thwack_ and a young second caught a bullet to the neck. A sniper, she realized, pinning all of them down. Immobilizing them.

  
Clarke’s hand closed around Lexa’s arm, pulling the other girl back into the treeline.

  
Clarke had to keep them both safe. No matter the cost.

 

___________  
___________

 

It's dawn when they find the shooter.

  
A huge field and half a dozen gunshots. Brittle grass crunching beneath Lexa’s boots. There's a scuffle and the mountain man has Lincoln in a chokehold. Kind, patient Lincoln who had helped them at every turn -- he pointed to his shoulder.

She knew what she had to do.

  
Lexa kills the mountain man without a second thought. _Click_. She exhales. _Boom_. A bullet through Lincoln’s shoulder and straight into the mountain man’s heart. He lay there crumpled and broken, bleeding into the thin layer of snow that covered everything. Soon the snow would come down once more and the corpse would be lost beneath it.

  
“Did that help?” Clarke's voice came from behind her, the commander's breath turning to a puff of steam in the cold air.

  
Lexa’s hands were trembling as she slowly lowered the gun.

  
“No.”

 

 

  
Lexa’s days are spent, more often than not, by Clarke’s side.

  
Nights are spent lying awake in her own tent thinking about what comes next, about what is waiting around the corner for them. Or she manages to sleep a handful of hours. Tossing and turning on the bedroll that had been provided for her.

  
Lexa wakes at dawn.

  
She doesn’t remember the last time she dreamed.

 

___________  
___________

 

“You sent for me?”

  
Lexa stood in the threshold of the tent like a half-formed ghost, before sweeping inside and carrying the crisp autumn air with her. Her eyes were on Clarke’s. Somehow demanding and sweet at the same time, the sky girl was a total contradiction.

  
Clarke had the feeling she'd never quite have Lexa figured out, no matter how much time she spent trying. But she liked complicated. Simple people bored her.

  
“Yes. Octavia has nothing to fear from me,” Clarke glanced down at the maps on the table, drawing in a breath. “I do trust you, Lexa.”

  
“I know how hard that is for you.”

  
The other girl had moved closer, shoulders curving towards Clarke as if the whole world were a secret that only the two of them knew.

  
“You must think our ways are harsh. But it’s how we survive,” said Clarke.

  
“Maybe life should be about more than just surviving.”

Lexa’s voice was soft, almost a sigh, and she glanced down at the table. At the war plans and the maneuvers. “Don't we deserve better than that?”

  
She was thinking about the future, Clarke could tell. A future without any bloodshed -- and it scared her, how utterly far-away that future seemed. As distant as a fairytale.

  
“Maybe we do,” Clarke said.

  
And she was leaning forward and pressing her lips against Lexa's, one hand placed on the back of the other girl’s head. Lexa tilted her head to deepen the kiss, a hand on the small of her back. Lexa parting Clarke’s lips with her own, hands gently cupping her face, every movement gloriously uninhibited.

  
For a moment nothing else existed.

  
Nothing else had ever existed.

  
It was as if Clarke had never been a weapon and had never been used.

  
___________  
___________

 

Lexa remembers the last night before the battle. There had been a tent glowing with dozens of candles, Clarke glowing in the center of it all. With her thin nightdress that fell loosely to her thighs, hair braided away from her face with waves cascading down her back.   
Clarke had looked almost soft in the candlelight.

  
But it was a trick of the light.

  
It had started slowly, the two of them sitting on Clarke’s wide mattress that sagged in the middle. Suspended breath. Lexa couldn't help but notice the flush pink of her lips, the length of Clarke’s eyelashes fluttering against her cheekbones.

  
This time, when their lips met, it felt inevitable.

  
Every moment was jewel toned and precious, the two of them suspended in the amber of the moment and helpless to stop time from progressing. A hand on her thigh. Clarke's hands knotted in the fabric of Lexa’s shirt as she pulled it over her head.

  
The two of them were warm beneath the fur coverlet. Lexa’s hands roamed over Clarke's body, over the curves of her waist, tracing the intricate tattoos that covered her body. Miles and miles of black ink. The traditional tattoos, yes, but also wildflowers and forests and flying birds so realistic she could have sworn their wings fluttered in the low light.

  
Clarke was gentle. Clarke was pliant and warm and touched her like she was something holy, hand moving slowly towards the meeting of her thighs.

  
It was enough to make the dread melt away.

  
And that was enough.

 

 

  
They awoke to shouts.

  
“Heda, come quickly!”

  
They stumble outside and see the signal in the sky, bright burning red against the clouds, and Lexa feels something building in the air, running through her body. Hope. Bellamy had done the impossible, shutting off the acid fog so they had a fighting chance.

  
It had been hard, plotting to send him as their man on the inside. What kind of person sent their best friend into a monster’s den, knowing the horror, knowing there was no guarantee of getting him back again?

  
_A terrible person_ , Lexa had thought.

  
_A reasonable leader who took necessary risks_ , Clarke had reassured her. And their risk had paid off.

  
“To war,” Heda Clarke shouts.

  Her warriors cheer, their thousands of voices rising into a roar. Heda Clarke’s face hardened beneath the warpaint. She would have been unrecognizable -- but then Clarke turned and smiled breathlessly at Lexa. And she saw the girl beneath. Exhilarated with the taste of victory and the sudden, distant possibility of better days to come.

  
Lexa looked out over the valley, at the army below them.

  
They had friends to return home. Family.

  
They had a war to win.

 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!  
> please leave a comment if you liked it or have feedback, that encourages me to keep writing!


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